OpenStreetMap

2009-07-27

It’s a project worth looking into. http://www.openstreetmap.org is home to the initiative to generate a publicly available and editable map source, not unlike Wikipedia except for maps.

The problem with this project is that it is currently lacking in participants in the USA, and the maps that have been uploaded from census data are very inaccurate. I live in North Carolina so I’ve taken up the task of correcting the roads that I travel to the best of my abilities.

I also bought a BU-353 GPS receiver, which can work with Linux, Mac, or Windows systems. On Mac OS X I’m using the macports-installed distribution of gpsd to interface between the receiver and navit.

Navit has a patch available created by yours-truly which enables showing distances in miles in the user interface (this project too is mostly european supported).